Marble Faun & Green Bough (4 page)

One should not die like this.
His voice has dropped and the wind is mouthing his words
While the lilacs nod their heads on slender stalks,
Agreeing while he talks,
Caring not if he is heard or is not heard.
One should not die like this.
Half audible, half silent words
That hover like gray birds
About our heads.

We sit in silent amity.
I am cold, for now the sun is gone
And the air is cooler where we three
Are sitting. The light has followed the sun
And I no longer see
The pale lilacs stirring against the lilac-pale sky.
They bend their heads toward me as one head.
—Old man—they say—How did you die?

I—I am not dead.

I hear their voices as from a great distance—Not dead
He’s not dead, poor chap; he didn’t die—

L
AXLY
reclining, he watches the firelight going
Across the ceiling, down the farther wall
In cumulate waves, a golden river flowing
Above them both, down yawning dark to fall
Like music dying down a monstrous brain.
Laxly reclining, he sees her sitting there
With firelight like a hand laid on her hair,
With firelight like a hand upon the keys
Playing a music of lustrous silent gold.
Bathed in gold she sits, upon her knees
Her silent hands, palm upward, lie at ease,
Filling with gold at each flame’s spurting rise,
Spilling gold as each flame sinks and sighs,
Watching her plastic shadow on the wall
In unison with the firelight lift and fall
To the music by the firelight played
Upon the keys from which her hands had strayed
And fallen.

                A pewter bowl of lilies in the room
Seems to him to weigh and change the gloom
Into a palpable substance he can feel
Heavily on his hands, slowing the wheel
The firelight steadily turns upon the ceiling.

The firelight steadily hums, steadily wheeling
Until his brain, stretched and tautened, suddenly cracks.

Play something else.
                              And laxly sees his brain
Whirl to infinite fragments, like brittle sparks,
Vortex together again, and whirl again.

Play something else.
                              He tries to keep his tone
Lightly natural, watching the shadows thrown,
Watching the timid shadows near her throat
Link like hands about her from the dark.
His eyes like hurried fingers fumble and fly
About the narrow bands with which her dress is caught
And lightly trace the line of back and thigh.
He sees his brain disintegrate, spark by spark.

Play something else, he says.
                                            And on the dark
His brain floats like a moon behind his eyes,
Swelling, retreating enormously. He shuts them
As one concealed suppresses two loud cries
And on the troubled lids a vision sees:

It is as though he watched her mount a stair
And rose with her on the suppleness of her knees,
Saw her skirts in swirling line on line,
Saw the changing shadows ripple and rise
After the flexing muscles; subtle thighs,
Rhythm of back and throat and gathered train.
A bursting moon, wheels spin in his brain.
As through a corridor rushing with harsh rain
He walks his life, and reaching the end
He turns it as one turns a wall

She plays, and softly playing, sees the room
Dissolve, and like a dream the still walls fade
And sink, while music softly played
Softly flows through lily-scented gloom.
She is a flower lightly cast
Upon a river flowing, dimly going
Between two silent shores where willows lean,
Watching the moon stare through the willow screen.
The hills are dark and cool, clearly remote,
Within whose shadow she has paused to rest.
Could she but stay here forever, where grave rain slants above them,
Rain as slow as starlight on her breast;
Could she but drift forever along these ways
Clearly shadowed, barred with veils of rain,
Beneath azure fields with stars in choired processional
To chant the silence from her heart again.

Laxly reclining, he feels the firelight beating
A clamor of endless waves upon the dark,
A swiftly thunderous surf swiftly retreating.
His brain falls hissing from him, a spark, a spark,
And his eyes like hurried fingers fumble and fly
Among the timid shadows near her throat,
About the narrow bands with which her dress is caught,
And lightly trace the line of back and thigh.
He sees his brain disintegrate, spark by spark,
And she turns as if she heard two cries.

He stands and watches her mount the stair
Step by step, with her subtle suppleness,
That nervous strength that was ever his surprise;
The lifted throat, the thin crisp swirl of dress
Like a ripple of naked muscles before his eyes.
A bursting moon: wheels spin in his brain,
And whirl in a vortex of sparks together again.

At the turn she stops, and trembles there,
Nor watches him as he steadily mounts the stair.

T
HE
cave was ribbed with dark. Then seven lights
Like golden bats windy along the eaves
Awoke and slipped inverted anchorage
In seven echoes of an unheard sound.
The cave is ribbed with music. Rumored far
The gate behind the moonwashed sentinel
Clangs to his lifted mace. Then all the bats
Of light slant whirring down the inclined air.

The cave no more a cave is: ribs of music
Arch and crack the walls, the uncaged bats
From earth’s core break its spun and floating crust.
Hissing seas rage overhead, and he
Staring up through icy twilight, sees
The stars within the water melt and sweep
In silver spears of streaming burning hair.

The seas roar past, shuddering rocks in seas
Mutter away like hoarse and vanquished horns.
Now comes dark again, he thinks, but finds
A wave of gold breaking a jewelled crest
And he is walled with gold. About him snored
Kings and mitred bishops tired of sin
Who dreamed themselves of heaven wearied,
And now may sleep, hear rain, and snore again.

One among them walks, whose citadel
Though stormed by sleep, is still unconquered.
In crimson she is robed, her golden hair,
Her mouth still yet unkissed, once housed her in
The sharp and quenchless sorrows of the world.
Kings in hell, robed in icy flame
Panted to crown them with her dreamless snows;
Glutted bishops, past the sentinel,
Couched in heaven, mewed for paradise.
Amid the dead walks she who, musicfleshed,
Whose mouth, two notes laid one on other for
A honeyed parting on the hived store;
Whose throat a sweetened reed had blown to be;
Whose breast was harped of silver and of two
Grave small singing birds uncaged; the chant
Of limbs to one another tuned and wed
That, as she walked, the air with music filled;
Now she, for whose caress once duke and king
And scarlet cardinal broke cords of fate,
From couch to couch her restless slumber seeks
And strokes indifferent lead with moaning hands.

The citied dead snore past, the hissing seas
Roar overhead again, and bows of coral
Whip gleaming fish in darts of unmouthed colors:
Trees of coral strip their colored leaves
Of fish, and each leaf has two bats of light
Where eyes would be, while other golden bats
Slipping among them, gleam their curving sides.
Thundering rocks crash down; spears of starlight
Shatter and break among them. Water-stallions
Neighing, crest the foaming rush of tides.
Drowning waves, airward rushing, crash
Columned upward, rake the stars and hear
A humming chord within the heavens bowled,
Then plunging back, they lose between the rocks
A dying rumor of the chanting stars.

The cave is ribbed with music; threads of sound
Gleam on the whirring wings of bats of gold,
Loop from the grassroots to the roots of trees
Thrust into sunlight, where the song of birds
Spins silver threads to gleam from bough to bough.
Grass in meadows cools his fancy’s feet:
Dew is on the grass, and birds in hedges
Weave the sunlight with sharp streaks of flight.
Bees break apple bloom, and peach and clover
Sing in the southern air where aimless clouds
Go up the sky-hill, cropping it like sheep,
And startled pigeons, like a wind beginning,
Fill the air with sucking silver sound.

He would leave the cave, before the bats
Of light grow weary, to their eaves return,
While music fills the dark as wind fills sails
And Silence like a priest on thin gray feet
Tells his beads of minutes on beside.
The cave is ribbed with dark, the music flies,
The bats of light are eaved and dark again.
Before him as, the priest of Silence by
And all the whispering nuns of breathing blent
With Silence’s self, he walks, the door beside
Stands the moonwashed sentinel to break
Its lichened sleep. Here halts the retinue.
The priest between his fingers lets his beads
Purr down. The nuns the timeless interval
Fill with all the still despair of breath.

He gateward turns. The sentinel his mace
Lifts in calm indifference. At the stroke
The sleeping gate wakes yawning back upon
Where gaunt Orion, swinging by his knees,
Crashes the arcing moon among the stars.

                                                        and let
within the antiseptic atmosphere
of russel square grown brisk and purified
the ymca (the american express for this sole purpose too)
let lean march teasing the breasts of spring
horned like reluctant snails within
pink intervals
                    a brother there
so many do somanydo
                        from out the weary courtesy of time
fate a lady shopper takes her change
brightly in coppers somanydo
with soaped efficiency english food agrees
even with thos cook
                                                 here is a
tunnel a long one like a black period
with kissing punctuate on our left we see
forty poplars like the breasts of girls
taut with running
                          on our left we see
that blanched plateau wombing cunningly
hushing his brilliant counterattack saying
shhhhhh to general blah in the year mille
neufcentvingtsomethingorother
                                            may five years defunct
in a patient wave of sleep till natures
stomach settles hearing their sucking boots
their brittle sweat harshly evaporating carrying
dung there was no time to drop
                                             the general himself
is now on tour somewhere in the states
telling about the war
                                            and here
battalioned crosses in a pale parade
the german burned his dead (which goes to show
god visited him with proper wrath)
                                                         o spring
above unsapped convolvulae of hills april
a bee sipping perplexed with pleasure o spring
o wanton o cruel
                        o bitter and new as fire
baring to the curved and hungry hand
of march your white unsubtle thighs
grass his feet no longer trouble grows
lush in lanes he
                      sleeps quietly decay
makes death a cuckold yes lady
8 rue diena we take care of that yes
in amiens youll find 3 good hotels

T
HERE
is no shortening-breasted nymph to shake
The tickets that stem up the lidless blaze
Of sunlight stiffening the shadowed ways,
Nor does the haunted silence even wake
                             Nor ever stir.

No footfall trembles in the smoky brush
Where bright leaves flicker down the dappled shade:
A tapestry that cloaks this empty glade
And shudders up to still the pulsing thrush
                          And frighten her

With the contact of its unboned hands
Until she falls and melts into the night
Where inky shadows splash upon the light
Crowding the folded darkness as it stands
                        About each grave

Whose headstone glimmers dimly in the gloom
Threaded by the doves’ unquiet calls,
Like memories that swim between the walls
And dim the peopled stillness of a room
                               Into a nave

Where no light breaks the thin cool panes of glass
To falling butterflies upon the floor;
While the shadows crowd within the door
And whisper in the dead leaves as they pass
                         Along the ground.

Here the sunset paints its wheeling gold
Where there is no breast to still in strife
Of joy or sadness, nor does any life
Flame these hills and vales grown sharp and cold
                         And bare of sound.

M
AN
comes, man goes, and leaves behind
The bleaching bones that bore his lust;
The palfrey of his loves and hates
Is stabled at the last in dust.

He cozened it and it did bear
Him to wishing’s utmost rim;
But now, when wishing’s gained, he finds
It was the steed that cozened him.

T
RUMPETS
of sun to silence fall
On house and barn and stack and wall.
Within the cottage, slowly wheeling,
The lamplight’s gold turns on the ceiling.
Beneath the stark and windless vane
Cattle stamp and munch their grain;
Below the starry apple bough
Leans the warped and clotted plow.
The moon rolls up, while far away
And thin with sorrow, the sheepdog’s bay
Fills the valley with lonely sound.
Slow leaves of darkness steal around.
The watch the watchman, Death, will keep
And man in amnesty may sleep.

The world is still, for she is old
And many’s the bead of a life she’s told.
Her gossip there, the watching moon
Views hill and stream and wave and dune
And many’s the fair one she’s seen wither:
They pass and pass, she cares not whither;—
Lovers’ vows by her made bright,
The outcast cursing at her light;
Mazed within her lambence lies
All the strife of flesh that dies.
Then through the darkened room with whispers speaking
There comes to man the sleep that all are seeking.